Category: Reviews

I.
Iceland is small. It’s a little bigger than Indiana, if that helps, filled only with the population of Pittsburgh. It feels big as you drive around it because of how much it resembles the U.S. West, especially as envisioned in Road Runner cartoons (except with bumpy lavarock fields instead of dust and dirt), but there are so few places in all that space to stop and look around. It’s like the opposite of a mall.

But like a mall, it’s easy to run into people. Sure: I was there for a conference, and so there were a number of folks doing the same things I did, seeing the same sights. But without any pre-planning, I ran into two of these people at a geyser and a waterfall. Even odder, I ran into an old gradschool friend who I knew was going to be in Iceland at some point this summer (though not for this conference) at the same waterfall. We hit the waterfall on Sunday. I also saw there the guy from our Friday walking tour of Reyjkavik who said he wanted a hot dog. On Monday we drove to the Snaefellsnes peninsula?a long, thin finger of land filled with mountains and waterfalls and tipped, at the sea, with a glacier?and we stopped on the way up at a museum on the settlement of Iceland (not recommended). In front of us in line were a middle-aged balding man and who I hoped was his daughter. They, I felt, were proceeding too slowly, and so I told Neal to hold back and let them proceed a bit so we didn’t keep bumping into them.

Tuesday, I saw them walking out of a cave.

II.
Tourism is booming in Iceland, and we could tell by how in-development everything was. Our hotel was mostly finished, but there was still construction noise one day and the back patio and basement spa were closed. Both the base office for our glacier tour and the ship we cruised the ocean on to watch birds and eat live scallops were equipped with full kitchens, but at this point were only serving coffee and pre-packaged snacks. The ship sat dozens, but our group was just ten people.

If Iceland were someone’s webpage it’d be topped with Under Construction gifs. “It’s the place, I hear,” texted a friend of mine last week, and he’s right. Outside of my conference friends I know six people who’ve gone in the last year or are going within the next. It’s cheap to get to. You can fly there direct from Boston, California, DC, NY, Miami, Chicago, and even Pittsburgh, where a roundtrip ticket flying out this week will cost you just $560.

That’s not counting seat selection or bags. Or water or snacks. Or your hotel room. Or food and water in Iceland, where nary a water fountain is to be found in this country that prides itself on its unimpeachable drinking water. It’s a smart tourism model: make it dirt cheap to get to and then charge an arm and a leg for everything you possibly can once they’re there. We never ate out in Iceland after having done so much of it so well in London and Paris, but footlong subs at Subway cost us $15 each.

But this isn’t anything new. T?mas, our walking tour guide, born in Chicago but raised his whole life in Reykjavik, told us that, growing up, his family would eat out maybe twice a year. It was always too expensive. Everything imported. Locals, he said, eat at Subway, or Domino’s, if they aren’t cooking at home. No one eats shark, or puffin, the “local delicacies” advertised at restaurants. Their numbers are dwindling, puffins, owing to climate change and unsustainable hunting. Add foodie tourists to the mix, and they could be gone pretty soon.

III.
I’d never been before to a place where most people had never been before. Everyone’s been to London and Paris. Everyone’s been to Denver. The effect of being in Iceland was like being on some frontier. I felt very lucky. Even at the Blue Lagoon, which maybe you’ve heard of, which is filled with the wastewater of a nearby geothermal power plant built in 1976, making it about a natural as a corn maze, I felt like Neal and I had discovered something private and magical.

Is this the draw of outdoorsy vacationing? Usually we’re in cities paying extra for the audiotour. It takes a lot out of you. Or me, at least. Day two of being home and I’m on antibiotics and a bland diet to combat the six days of severe GI distress I’ve been fist-clenching my way through. Neal, though, is fine. Blame me, not Iceland.

We landed at 11:45pm and the sun was setting, and by the time we got through security with our bags, got driven to the rental car company’s Garage Hut on The Plain that reminded Neal of any number of workman buildings he’d spent time in in South Dakota, and drove our Hyundai i30 the 40 minutes to Reyjavik, it was well past first light and on the way to sunrise. At night here, it doesn’t get dark. Dusk happens at midnight and ends at 3am. To the west, the sky all night is a line of orange beaming in through every window.

The temptation not to sleep, because the sun is still up, is strong. I haven’t gone to bed at dusk since I was maybe 7. We saw as we got into town whole families walking the sidewalks around 1am. It felt like being in Scarfolk.

I felt a flickish, itchy thing in the back of my throat the moment we got to Gatwick and now, 24 hours after landing, I’m sipping a ginger tea that Neal made for me from our room’s electric kettle and chasing it with Guaifenesin I’m sipping straight from the bottle ($15). The small rocks glass I’d hoped to sip Duty Free Jameson from is slowly filling with what the Icelandic pharmacist called “slime”. Whole oysters of it. I think I’m past the worst, but my mood for conferencing about the intricacies of writing nonfiction?which is what I’m here to do?is very low. When I speak, I sound like the squeak your butt makes on the bottom of the tub.

In Reyjkavik, the disorientation of daylight is countered by the comfort of knowing that not only does everyone speak English, but nearly every sign at stores and in public buildings is written in it. It’s an imperialist privilege to be able to speak your native language at people who know it only through working hard at it late(r) in life. (A shame we pay the world’s favors back by telling them we’re going to continue destroying their climates.) It’s, I got told over beers with my gradschool friend Daryl, who flew out here from the distant Eastern end of the island amid a weekslong bike trip he’s just about midway through, the case throughout Iceland. Everyone speaks English. Many of them?the night hotel desk-attendant/bartender, the guy who worked at the outdoor-gear shop we stopped in, last night’s gas station attendant?are native English speakers working here for unknown reasons.

What would bring a person to Iceland on their own? Quite possibly the same things that take people to San Francisco. Meals here average around $40 a person, and AirBnB is an increasing nightmare in a city with a housing shortage. But everywhere you turn, suddenly there’s a sea or the ocean and beyond it tall mountains dusted with green patches and slips of white snow. The skies have been so far full of clouds, and outside the city there are no trees, and so while it feels like life on The Great Plains I’ve found the skies here to be more gorgeous. The rugged terrain helps, the hills and swells that frame the clouds in shapes other than a perfect overhead dome.

Today, Neal drove me in the i30, which is a stick-shift, to register for the conference, and on the way we were both pleased to see that Reykjavik has a company that drives you around the city in a big double-decker bus and tells you through prerecorded audio what what you’re looking at is. We may do it tomorrow. I have a lot of people I want to see and spend time with, and I hope these people want to see and spend time with me, but during the introductory wine reception it felt strange seeing these U.S. faces in this faraway country I thought I’d never get a chance to see, and I kept wondering if they felt the same. Are we all with our business getting in the way of each other’s waking dream of this place?

Make writers travel and they all become travel writers, and nothing dumps on a travel writer’s sense of specialness more than another writer travelwriting within eyeshot. I know I’m both here with the conference and I’m here with Neal. Tonight, I’m here with Neal.

I.
We were walking back to the audiotour counter at the Tate Modern, having just seen the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibit I’d been lured to by the very pretty closeup of the ass and balls I’d seen online somewhere, and but where I stayed for the shots of water (at right) and other fine pictures, and in walking through the Busy On A Bank Holiday museum, I’d been thinking about walking in London, and how after this many days I’d been confused about where to put my body in a hall. These people drive on the gauche side of the road, and I’ve read enough about cognition to see how we might then understand such people as operating their brains differently than we do. Where do they see throughways undergoing? How can I best position myself in that vision?

It was, I soon saw, London and walking through it, like moving through an 8-bit video game?one of those where at the edge of the screen a person or monster appears still and unmoving, waiting for the instant you pass some coded pixel to vector you-ward at such a pace that you’re guaranteed helpful or hurtful bumping-into unless you jump or dodge left. I’d watched in stations both here and in Paris men with phones stand perfectly still until their moving would result in his and my perfect collision. And then I watched them step perfectly toward me.

I was thinking about this, this video game idea, for the first time. It hit me in the Tate Modern. And then suddenly a woman was vectoring at me, as though my new idea had willed her to. She was older than me by a decade, and she wore a fluorescent yellow vest and a walkie-talkie at her beltline.

“Are you okay?” she said to me.

II.
“Say again?” I heard our pub waitress ask an athletic, well-shortsed young dad that morning, as he requested something specific about the table he needed for his wife and baby and (my guess) mother-in-law. I thought, what an interesting way to express that one hasn’t heard one. So different from “What’s that?” or “How’s that?” or “What’d you say?” or “Sorry?” In Alabama, every native I mumbled at too rapidly would say, “Do what?” as though they’d assumed, even just by my talking, that I’d given them an order.

What I’m saying is that much of the delight of being in other places in the world and hearing the people there talk is that there are, even in our own language, so many ways to express the same idea, and if you like, as I do, to think about connotations and nuance in language, it sets the mind reeling to what a simple reflexive expression might indicate about the speaker’s head and her heart.

III.
Her Are You Okay? sounded like what I’d expect to hear from a kind bystander had I just been blapped in the forehead by an errant kickball or called a faggot by a man in a MAGA hat. Are you okay? I was in the middle of thinking about strangers as videogame figures when she said it. I stopped walking toward the audiotour counter. I looked at her. It took just an instant to see that her face projected not concern for my well being?no widened eyes, no raised brows, no open mouth?but something collected and friendly. I, she said with her face, Am Trying To Be Helpful.

I must have had a look on me, midthinking about other people, of being utterly lost and tired and afraid.

“Oh yeah no I’m good thanks,” I said, and then I pointed to the audiotour counter I was headed to. “Just need to return these.” I held up my and Neal’s audiotour consoles, which the Tate had adorned with limegreen lanyards so they’d hung conveniently around my neck.

“Yes,” she said and the turned and pointed behind her. “Straight ahead and to your left.”

I was looking directly at the Audiotours sign as she said it. At the counter, the Italian woman who’d given us our A/V devices was on the phone. I struggled unknotting Neal’s and my two devices from off my neck, and she, amid her conversation in Italian, said ‘Sokay and so I handed them over entwisted.

IV.
Minutes after the well-shortsed and fat-packaged young dad solicited a Say Again?, Mel B, the onetime Spice Girl, the one who went by “Scary Spice”, walked into the same pub in a ballcap with two female companions. I looked over at her and she looked over at me looking at her. (I’d had to be told it was Mel B.)

V.
Clearly, the joys of traveling are visual. We want to see new things. In travelling abroad, we feel new things. Foremost among them, for me, have been an anxiety about language?in Paris, where it felt like with every desire I had came a worry about whether I’d be able to express it?and an unease about space. This is a way to understand the difference between travel and tourism: the latter functions to remove these and other feelings from the former. We tour so that we might see without new feelings, or at least new negative ones.

That said, I love touring. I love sitting at the top of a double-decker bus and being told what I’m looking at as my head hangs back and my jaw sags open. Touring has its own kind of movements?controlled but erratic?and a bevy of languages you select at the start of your audiotour. It’s not for everyone. In London, at the Queen Mother Gates stop, a young straight couple got on board and sat just behind us. They looked like they’d just failed to make the cut for the cast of The Jersey Shore. “Is this where the underground city is?” the man asked our guide at our first red light. “I saw a documentary about it.”

Our guide did his best to try to inform him about something that didn’t exist. “Where are we headed now?” the man asked, moments later. Shouted this across the top of the bus. Then he fell silent, and soon I turned around and snapped a picture.

I liked The Imitation Game. I wasn’t going to alert you to the spoiler of his being gay because I don’t think it should be a spoiler. And hell, I didn’t see any trailers for the movie so maybe it wasn’t, but there was some coyness early in the script about Turing’s secret, and my parents had never before this Oscar season heard of Alan Turing, so I’m glad for the movie for letting everyone know that one of the most important geniuses and war heroes of the 20th century was?to let history spoil the film’s end?a gay man whose government forced him to take hormone treatments that destroyed his mind and body so much it led him to end his own life at age 41.

Also, the movie is crafty in how it leads its characters to talk about what’s normal for human beings. Here’s the speech culled unverifiedly from IMDB. It’s the lead actress role talking to Turing after his mind has gone and he admires the normal life she’s been able to build since the war:

No one normal could have done that. Do you know, this morning… I was on a train that went through a city that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for you. I bought a ticket from a man who would likely be dead if it wasn’t for you. I read up on my work… a whole field of scientific inquiry that only exists because of you. Now, if you wish you could have been normal… I can promise you I do not. The world is an infinitely better place precisely because you weren’t.

I read David Leavitt’s impressive biography of Alan Turing when it came out because I’d just come out, and I needed help. How am I supposed to be? One way we humans have answered that question is by looking to how some of us have been. The Imitation Game does everything every Hollywood biopic always does, and I’ve blathered before about my feelings on biopics. What made this one different, though, is how it presented this man’s achievements as possible not despite his being gay but because he was. And those are the kinds of heroes we need.

I know: “Who cares?” I’m not, as they say, a social justice warrior, even though I teach at a Jesuit university—and as they also say, never go in against a Jesuit in a Check-Your-Privilege contest when social justice is on the line. But there’s no question that A Christmas Story‘s the worst, the most white-dude het-centric holiday movie ever, yes?

But all that aside, all the Boomer nostalgia aside, all the raspy winsome narrator who talks as though guffaws you’d never think to return are about to erupt from his belly aside, here’s what I hate about A Christmas Story. Maybe you remember the leg lamp? There’s a lamp the quote-unquote old man wins in a contest that arrives in a crated box wrapped in tow.

It looks like a sexy lady’s leg stuck in a nylon stocking!
Continue reading I Hate A Christmas Story

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Mention Zentai Suits

Okay I lied about reading all of them. These are only the highlights from two hours earlier this evening.

Piqued, I decided to get outside and go read somewhere public. It was too windy for the park, so I found myself at a bar near my house that looked mostly empty and wouldn’t be noisy. My Guinness cost seven dollars, and within minutes of my first sip a woman with a British accent sat down next to me at the bar and ordered a mimosa. It was 2:45pm. At the other end of the bar sat a hefty MF couple in black leather jackets who seemed chummy with the bartender: a short, wiry woman in a greying white tanktop. “Can you do a mimosa?”

The bartender assured her she could. “I could put some fresh grapefruit juice in it?”

“Lovely,” said the Brit. “And a bloody Mary.”

She was met by her friend, and soon afterward a pearish dude, late 20s, in a navy blue hoodie sat at the end of the bar, next to them. I finished “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)” and went on to “Amahl and the Night Visitors”. Between underlining passages that I felt illustrated lessons I’d like my students next week to learn, I overheard some chitchat. The threesome at the end of the bar became a threesome and got along famously. He just moved here from Dallas in May, being called out to San Francisco by a college friend to help on his startup. They sell smoking accessories. Pipes, bowls, vaporizers. Started with just $250,000 seed money, but it’s going quite well.
Continue reading A San Francisco Saturday

[This is a blog post about a thing on Adult Swim few people may even know anything about. Just as a warning: you might not care about what follows.]

It’s an Eggersian title, TGEiTH, and similarly steeped in irony. Not necessarily cloaked in it. To get everyone excited about a thing that in the end wasn’t exciting whatever TGEiTH entailed was cloaked instead in secrecy. Turns out it was a 15-minute highly ironized behind-the-scenes documentary about Adam Scott and John Hamm filming a shot-for-shot remake of the Simon & Simon opening credits.

I’m 35 and if I’d ever heard of this show I’ve never seen so much as a clip of it.

I don’t get it. I guess the idea for Adult Swim (out of whose key demographic I’m days away from falling) was that the mustaches and period costumes would be enough for the kids to laugh at. And maybe if I were in my 40s like Scott, Hamm, et al., I’d be able to watch and go like “Oh yeah, that’s totally how that opening went” in my head. Then I laugh from the delight of recognition?

What’s not interesting: this is all such dull easy 90’s-style irony. What might be: this 90’s-style irony is charged in TGEiTH by our post-millennial-style celebrity worship. A shot-for-shot remake of a 1970’s TV show’s opening credit sequence is not inherently funny. Not any more than the sequence itself is, campily, through the lens of 30+ years of developing TV sensibilities. But such a remake starring the guy who plays, on basic cable, a tall alcoholic child in the 1950s who looks all right in suits? Not yet, but it helps.

There’s a kind of cool-kid clubbiness to TGEiTH. It’s like watching the hammy team captain get laughs during the spring musical because everyone knows him outside his costume. Cameos by Megan Mullally, Pauls Scheer and Rudd help. What I’m saying is I think most of the allure of this thing is in watching cool, good-looking, A-list funny people hang out and be silly together. It’s not a gross desire per se, but there is something gross in “Also Starring MEGAN MULLALLY” serving as a joke.

Right? Maybe I’m just down on people playing themselves playing other people for laughs. Maybe I’m just confused that such winking self-reference can still find a loving audience. No way would TGEiTH exist without its star power, and now Adam Scott’s doing another one in a few weeks, co-starring Amy Poehler.

What’ll it be this time? Scarecrow and Mrs. King?

UPDATE: This post now readable in condensed letter-to-the-editor format.

The paper’s argument is this:

Giving our stamp of approval to individual candidates does little to engender trust in the public. In fact, it can undermine that trust.

…

The public is better served if it trusts The News to report fairly and freely on the candidates seeking office. It is better served if the opinion section identifies the important issues that affect the community and makes cogent arguments supporting the opinions expressed about those issues.

First: “cogent arguments” have never in the two years I’ve lived here been too heavy a concern for The News’s opinion page, at least not in the letters it allows to get printed.

But second, this is terrible news. The News “question[s] whether endorsements really function as a persuasive tool,” and thinks “it is hard for many people to believe that an organization can … urge people to cast their votes for an individual and at the same time present information critical about that individual.” In other words, The News is afraid of being called out for biased reporting, treating too favorably the candidates it eventually endorses.

I don’t think candidate endorsements have ever functioned as a persuasive tool, and no way are they functioning like this now. Given cable news, can the daily newspaper^[1] really sway public opinion with one endorsement editorial printed just days before elections? What’s more worrisome, though, is that The News sees endorsement not as unpersuasive, but as a way of undermining the public’s trust.

This is a fairly new idea—that subjectivity and reporting to inform public opinion make for bad journalism—and if it weren’t Sunday morning I’d be able to better point out how it’s a radically conservative idea. It’s what’s made Fox News so successful that my father-in-law points to how carefully that network brings in voices from both sides of an issue as evidence for its fair and balanced approach. Which is madness. To believe in a “balanced approach” is to assert that every issue has not one or three or twenty stances worth exploring, but always precisely two. Pro- and Anti-. This is not just wrong, it’s often harmful to progress. After all, it’s been the belief in a “balanced approach” that has put Creationism in certain states’ biology classrooms.

Look, a newspaper is not the voice of the people, it’s a voice for the people. It’s the voice of the reporters it pays to do one job: find the stories and deliver the facts without the manic pace and need for caught eyeballs that is cable news’s bread and butter. It’s a voice the public has always had the option to ignore. An endorsement in a newspaper, then, is not the kingmaking move The News thinks it is, so much as a place to weigh the facts months of reporting have unearthed (because most of us don’t have the time to do this tough but vital job). It’s a place for a newspaper to be an informed authority. This isn’t arrogant or presumptive, it’s called being responsible.

Here’s the problem: we no longer live in a time when authorities are given due respect. A woman spends her entire career studying the changes in the climate, say, and the public responds to her warnings about global warming by asking for a second opinion. It need never be an informed opinion, just a second one that argues the opposite point. But if you believe, as I do, in the power of expertise, the solution to this problem is to find ways to rebuild trust in authorities. That’s the opportunity The News has now lost. In refusing to play its part as election experts, the paper claims to be honoring the power of public opinion, but really it’s throwing up its hands in the face of it.

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I.
My taxidermy book uses its central historical figure the way most people are used: for someone else’s personal gain. In this case, my own. What the life of Carl Akeley, the oft-called Father of Modern Taxidermy, got me was both an ongoing narrative and also a kind of structural cubby closet in which I could stow all the present-day taxidermy stuff I was way more interested in thinking about.

Despite my using Akeley (or more precisely, as a kind of toll or penance for using him), I had the responsibility to turn the events of his life into a story readers could be engaged in. It was work I sometimes came to hate. The problem, it seemed to me, was that I had no primary source. Akeley had been dead for almost eighty years when I started writing about him, and even his own (ghostwritten) memoirs weren’t going to give me the intimate details I wanted to turn an actual person who lived into an interesting nonfictional character.

In other words, the form of nonfiction I chose dictated that I recreate a life on the page as fully as that life was inside a body. That this problem provided a nice echo of the one every taxidermist has whenever he tries to mount a lifelike animal skin didn’t much assuage the unease I felt while doing it.
Continue reading Against Biography: An Initial Position